Pixel Qi's display technology debuts at Computex

As promised, Pixel Qi has been demonstrating its display technology this week in Taiwan. The idea behind this technology is that with a flip of a button you can go from a traditional high-resolution color display, to a backlight-disabled state which makes it perfectly visible outdoors, to a very energy efficient e-paper mode. Best of all, Pixel Qi's screens use conventional LCD technology, so manufacturing costs should not be much of an issue.

For its demonstration at Computex, the company modified off-the-shelf Acer netbooks, fitting them with the displays and drilling a hole on the side for a toggle switch that alternates between the screen’s different modes. In the video embedded after the jump, John Ryan, Pixel Qi's COO and vice president of sales of marketing, demonstrates the displays' ability to be read in sunlight, and also notes how unlike E-Ink screens (read Kindle) it refreshes fast enough to display video and respond to user inputs.

Ryan claims the company recently received its first batch of transflective displays, will have a second batch in a week, and expects a third much larger batch in a month. Production will potentially reach “hundreds of thousands a month” by early 2010, when the screens will be available to netbook manufacturers; though unfortunately he doesn’t mention any customers in particular.